Moving Books
In this Episode
In this episode, we recap Moving Books, a public lecture series organized by Madeline Zehnder with support from the research group “Kleine Formen”. Spanning the 2024–25 academic year, the series brought together different scholars, who explored histories of books in motion across sites ranging from contemporary Argentina to early modern Czechia. Talks in this series considered books not just as texts but as material artifacts that move through space and invite user interaction. Like the books they examined, these talks travelled across borders of genre, nation, religion, and historical period to investigate practices and infrastructures of global information flows alongside related questions of use, portability, and scale.
We walk through four compelling talks: Verónica Stedile Luna (National University of La Plata/ICI Berlin) opens this recap by exploring an experimental Argentine editorial project that blurs the line between editing and writing. Marie Hanzelková and Jiří Dufka (Masaryk University) then take us to early modern Czechia, tracing how cheap printed chapbooks crossed cultural and religious boundaries over three centuries. Annachiara Raia (Leiden University) examines how portable Islamic texts traveled through Swahili literary networks across the Indian Ocean. And Corinna Norrick-Rühl (University of Münster) closes things out with a look at mail-order book culture, asking what it meant to receive a “frisky” object in your mailbox.
Madeline Zehnder, the organizer of this lecture series, is a trained literary scholar. Her research covers book history, material culture, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature. After finishing her master’s degree and PhD at the University of Virginia, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s research group “Kleine Formen”.
Recommended citation:
“Moving Books”. A lecture series organized by Madeline Zehnder, in: microform. Der Podcast des Graduiertenkollegs Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen, available at: www.kleine-formen.de/moving-books/, Berlin 2026 [Datum des letzten Abrufs].
Images:
Books published by Carlos Ríos’s imprint Oficina Perambulante.
One side of an uncut sheet, printed on both sides, in octavo size (eight leaves, sixteen pages), showing several broadside ballads awaiting cutting, gathering, and sewing. mZK, sign. vK-0011.234. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/One-side-of-an-uncut-sheet-printed-on-both-sides-in-octavo-size-eight-leaves-sixteen_fig2_365922363.
Swahili coast books and pamphlets from the University of Leiden collections.
Two Reader’s Digest Condensed Books editions, both containing John Hersey’s novella “A Single Pebble” (left: Pleasantville, 1956; right, with dust jacket: London/Sydney/Cape Town, 1956).
Further reading:
Fumerton, P., Kosek, P., & Hanzelková, M. (eds.). 2023. Czech Broadside Ballads as Text, Art, Song in Popular Culture, c.1600–1900. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789463721554.
Norrick-Ruhl, C. 2019. Book Clubs and Book Commerce. Elements in Publishing and Book Culture. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/book-clubs-and-book-commerce/3C50183E95136DAD1FC7FB51FD6E6A1E.
Raia, A. 2022. “Easy to handle and travel with: Swahili booklets and transoceanic reading experiences in the Indian Ocean littoral.” In M. A. Thumala Olave (ed.), The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_7.
Stedile Luna, V. 2017. “La feria, la serie y el montaje: mesas de disección.” Malisia 2 (2017): 8–11.
Credits
Moderation
Madeline Zehnder
Editor
Marvin Renfordt
Mastering
Johann Gartlinger
Script
Madeline Zehnder
Music
“Hibiscus” by Blue Dot Sessions
Jingle
Michael Hoeldke (composition) and Cathrin Bonhoff (voice)
Social Media and Technical Support
Jasper Novak